Do you live in the Welsh village of Crumlin, Caerphilly? Then you may well be getting fast broadband next month, delivered via the town's many power poles.
Virgin Media today said it had selected the settlement - population 5724, welcomes careful drivers - to play host to its trial of the technology, which will see fibre-optic …

Tidy!!

West ignored AGAIN

Caerphilly... so more for the already speed rich east of Wales while this western county is still in the below 8 meg stranglehold of BTw who daily fleece us for s poor service with low allowances due to the rediculous charging regime allowed by their tame pet OFCOM.

How about a REAL challenge Virgin? Come west of Swansea and even Carmarthen (market 2 even though its much smaller than here) - SWPM is ripe for this! A way off from your core network and mostly pole fed and 2 communities either side of a hill both run from the same exchange - with low speeds and a decayed telecoms infrastructure - has to explain the slow speeds even on lines of modest length!

This would be a real test of the issues including linking back to civilisation. An area easily over 9,000 lines (the exchange stats haven't changed for at least 4 years despite lots of house-building) someone could sweep the board here - there is a hunger for better, especially as the kids experience JANET at the local college but come home to the BTw crawl - The Local Authority have "Updata" but decent service doesnt extend to the proles or Pembrokeshire it seems

Broadband in Crumlin?

Interesting

How well will this fibre stand up to wind movement and the odd electrical engineer wiggling the cable around? In my experience fibre cores break ridiculously easily, but I'm sure they've got this under consideration.

WAIT !!!

Amazing ?

They have been doing this in India for years - cable operators string cable over the local lighting infrastructure. Quick. Cheap. Easy to repair (though can suffer more failures due to low cost housing). The normal MO is a cable operator get a big satellite dish + box, buys a decoder, distributes the decoded feed. Later, many added broadband with varying levels of competence.

@ Neil Barnes Hmm. 50Mb/s, and Virgin?

this is new in the UK ??

"They have been doing this in India for years - cable operators string cable over the local lighting infrastructure"

They have been doing this in the US since cable first came out . The power and telcos have been doing this before cable was around. On the poles out here you will find power,telco and the cable companies on the same pole. Far as I know the cable companies don't own their poles.

more?

I really hope this works, and they continue this nationwide. I'm seriously fed up with my crappy connection.

1mb/s is a good speed for me here. Which is an improvement since i switched to o2 from when i was on the more congested tiscali when i only got 0.5mb/s

Cant wait for BBC radio news to start reporting on this, they can use their weekly "is your braodband fast enough" story, where people phone in and complain "i pay for up to 8, but i only get half that, i want half my money back"